Dazzle Ships

London's limited entertainment choices

I attended the Creativity and Technology conference in London yesterday where there was lots of good ideas and comment about the opportunities (and dangers) that technology offers consumers, advertising and the world in general in the present and near future. Lots of talk about augmented reality, lots of impressive looking creative product, and lots and lots of Apple products about (must have wounded Microsoft, one of the sponsors, just a little bit).

Earlier in the week I attended one of the IPA's Behavioural Economics workshops, and this area was referred to again in one of the talks yesterday. Behavioural Economics is gaining heat within the communications fraternity at the moment. It's an area that we've made reference to quite a lot within this blog thorugh its history and, as Toby mentioned, more is to come. In this instance it was Lastminute.com's Marko Balabanovic who was talking about the effect of expanded choice on consumer decision-making (a la Schwartz's 'Paradox of Choice').

Marko talked about a new iPhone app called 'Topsee' which provides consumers with entertainment options close to wherever they are (restricted to London Zone 1 at present). So far, so whatever. However where other info providers might strive to provide the consumer with the maximum number of options available to them, limited only by the data that the provider had access to, Topsee limits what the consumer sees. It is designed only to provide a few options, based on bringing to you only specific, recommended experiences. Marko gave an example of a restaurant recommendation that might be provided specifically because the risotto it does is a food critic's favourite dish.

It's easy to start to drown in choice in London when every option is put in front of you. I quite liked Topsee's approach as a reaction to this. As long as the recommendations are kept fresh I can see it being a very useful tool. It's nothing new of course, more a return to old-fashioned recommendation. But good to see a use of location-based data that doesn't succumb to the temptation to throw everything it can at the consumer and leave them with a load of indecision.

-- Alex

Rupert who?

Whatever the reason or intent behind Rupert Murdoch's recent anti-Google musing I wonder what the folk at Mountain View think about this in the context of their longer term ambitions? As recently demonstrated in a bit of an acquisition frenzy, they seem much more interested in the ever-nascent mobile category. They've have been on a near $1bn spending spree of late with their purchase of VOIP provider Gizmo5, and iPhone app supremo AdMob. Safe to say their focus could be on what they see as bigger things!

So what does this mean for the future? Well, in the UK Google have a friend in the shape of the government's Digital Britain project, which counts the liberalisation of radio spectrum as part of its wide ranging remit. A recent report from Ofcom shows just how this could benefit the likes of Google. The report marks the start of the exploration of technology to link up spare bits of radio spectrum "white space" across the UK, accessed by devices that can switch between the best available signal depending on a user's location.

Google would no doubt want to be part of this, and would be unlikely to follow the traditional model of charging users for network access. Rather they'd monetise through keyword advertising, whether they needed to pay the Government for a license or not. This certainly was their intention in bidding in the American 700 MHz spectrum auction last year. Although they were unsuccessful, they managed to force through legislation for the 700 MHz spectrum to be open access. Meaning telcos like Verizon could no longer block content or devices that didn't suit their ends - Google content or devices. And so Google can now go direct to the user, and not have to go via the telcos.

Mind-bending stuff! And certainly would suggest Google have bigger shrimps to barbie than News Corp...


Angus

Look both ways before you create

 

Everyone loves an energiser before a meeting where you want some ideas. Get the creative juices flowing. Well, here's one to try. And it doesn't involve holding hands or revealing any of your innermost secrets. No, simply moving your eyes from side to side will give you a creativity boost. Scientific fact.

It's all about getting the two sides of your brain communicating, apparently. The scientific testing hasn't been in any way specific to coming up with ideas in the field of media and communications, it has to be said, but hey, what have you got to lose by giving it a go?

-- Alex

Getting out of the 21 day habit

It's a brief that we've all seen many times across many sectors - a desire to create a habit in consumers. Be it eating fruit and veg, drinking water, reading a particular newspaper, taking a probiotic drink, etc, we're challenged to create a daily habit in consumers' routines.

Habit-forming equates to frequent communications, but we've often searched for an insight into how long we need to communicate for. How long does it take for someone to form a habit, and therefore how long should we keep up the pressure?

A favourite response to this has been 21 days. This magic number appears in many a Google search against the subject. What's handy about 21 days is that it's a friendly number to the media planner. Three weeks is pretty do-able for the majority of media plans, especially TV.

However, new research shows that this convenient number is not the planning shortcut we might have hoped. This post at PsyBlog describes the findings, but the main points are:

- The average length of time for a habit to form is 66 days.
- There's huge variance according to what habit someone is trying to get into (from 18 to 254 days in the habits studied).
- Habit-forming is a curved function, progress towards automaticity (you do it without thinking) is faster earlier on and then slows down.
- Missing a day here and there doesn't destroy the habit formation.

Suddenly a TV strategy is looking a little pricier.

How does this help communications planning? Well, it gives us some scope of the length of the process, against which we can consider how difficult and disruptive against current routine the habit we are trying to encourage is. It also would suggest that the early stages are the most important (something we might have already thought, in fairness). Perhaps an approach of more directly eliciting behaviour in the early days, moving to a more arms-length reminder strategy later on would bear fruit.

But it sure ain't as simple as three weeks of telly.

-- Alex

Digital Outdoor. This is more like it...

For media people of my generation, 'building projection' means Gail Porter on the Houses of Parliament.

But things have moved on a bit.....

This is pretty cool as well...

Weirdly, both of these are from Holland. I have no idea why that should be.

Big Phil from Fuse has been talking to the creators of the first projection, so knows all the prodcution spec stuff.  Give him a shout if you're interested in knowing more...

-- Toby

Twittering away in the echo chamber

Everyone loves a bit of Twitter, well according to the marketing community they do anyhow. Indeed marketers can hardly be blamed for getting excited given the hyperbole around the social network. But sometimes it's hard to see the wood for the trees. Luckily, Google offers a (free) chainsaw of sorts with its Ad Planner tool. Based on affinity with other sites UK visitors to Twitter.com look rather like the digital marketing community, being more likely to visit sites like distilled.co.uk, searchcowboys.com, Netimperative.com and econsultancy.com. Compare and contrast with social networks like Facebook and Myspace to see just how insular the current Twitter user base looks. Looks like the marketing community has indeed found its next echo chamber!

Thanks to Yin for the flag.

Angus

The new, new thing...

Remember neuromarketing?

Well, that's old news.

Welcome to genomarketing.  I can't quite work out whether this is real or not, but, scarily, I suspect it is.

If we're all really that desperate to find some kind of 'scientific' framework for what we do, can we all just stop surfing through these nascent, and often highly speculative, areas of science like a bunch of post-modernists and actually try something a bit more established and robust.

Like behavioural economics.  (More on this soon...)

Thanks to Richard M for the tip.

-- Toby

Twitter makes Santa's life easier!

You know the song right?  Well, thanks to the addition by Twitter that allows users to make their own created lists of Twitterers public, now you no longer have to guess which of the most important lists in the world you appear on!

Of course, if you want something a bit more serious (and maybe even work related) then you could do worse than check out Listorious.com which is indexing all the best, most followed lists being created by twitter users.

I love the ingenuity of 'Santa' making use of this new development and remember, we all have just 7 short weeks to make sure we're on the 'Nice' list!  You can see how your plan is progressing at Santa's twitter page.

Bryan aka ThePersuader

UPDATE - I've already made it onto the 'Nice' list.  Job done!

Grasping at straws?

Rupert Murdoch is barely out of the headlines at the moment with his unrelenting drive to monetise the internet, and specifically News Corp journalism. This week, the "Murdoch doesn't get it" story is how they intend to stop their sites appearing in Google search results, as mooted in a Sky Australia interview. This would mean a range of sites could disappear from Google's search results including The Sun, The Times and the Wall Street Journal. This is not just a case of giving people the first paragraph as a teaser and then asking them to pay when they click. No, in a move reminiscent of a Ray Bradbury novel he's considering erasing every single News Corp word from Google results by removing them from the search index. Broadly speaking this is what you might call the Direct Line approach, in that he thinks that people will come direct to his sites rather than via Google. Naturally this ignores the vast number of people who have Google as their homepage, and thus navigate via it. And this also assumes that News Corp journalism is of such unique quality that people will come directly.

It's usually a fairly safe rule of thumb that you should never under-estimate Murdoch, he's repeatedly demonstrated his far-sightedness as leader of News Corp. So perhaps he knows something no-one else does about monetising the internet. But it's very hard to see what that might be! Some suggestions for the straws he might be grasping at:

• The editorial lure of his online properties are strong enough to cause people to come direct rather than via Google.
• A discerning/paying audience will mean New Corp can charge more for online ad space.
• Perhaps this is a precursor to New Corp buddying up with a rival search engine - Bing?
• The worm will turn against Google in time and other publishers will follow suit, putting News Corp ahead of the curve.
• Government intervention will limit Google's grip on the online audience - perhaps he's hoping one of his high-level political chats can leverage this?

Maybe it's a combination of these, maybe none. More broadly, in the Sky interview he doesn't sound like his usual decisive self when being pressed about online commercial strategy by a friendly Sky journalist, he really does sound like he's grasping at straws. You can almost hear the sigh of relief when the subject moves on to Obama et al.

Angus

Google vs. News Corp

Top of the bill yesterday, news that Rupert Murdoch will remove his news content from Google. 

(Well, he only sort of said it - the actual interview's here)

Cue predictable responses.  Murdoch's a dinosaur and, you know, 'doesn't get it' (Bingo!).  Now, be fair everyone,  Murdoch hasn't done too badly.   

Also pretty predictable glee at the inevitable decline of Murdoch's 'evil empire'. Right on!  He's an apologist for Chinese totalitarianism!  The bastard! 

Oh, wait...

Anyway - all this as a prelude to a very interesting piece from Adlab, that cuts out the hyperbole and actually looks at the data.

Which shows us what?  That maybe Google isn't as important to News Corp's news sites as you might think.

Let battle commence...

-- Toby